REUNION

posted by James Reel

    My cello has come home! It’s been in the shop for what seems like three but is probably only two weeks. Zoran, the cellist/luthier from whom I bought the instrument, had promised to fix up the many scratches on the old thing when I wrote him the check last spring, but only recently did his schedule and mine allow time for my cello to go to the spa. The instrument is nothing really special, a German factory job from the first third of the 20th century, but Zoran and my teacher, Harry, and for that matter I, found it to have a lovely, even tone and not likely to compound my own inadequacies as a beginner.
    Zoran functions in some out-of-joint Croatian time zone, even though he’s lived in Tucson for something like a decade and a half, so his work usually takes a bit longer than one might prefer. But the wait was worth it. I won’t say the instrument looks like new, which I wouldn’t like anyway—the deeper color and darker grain of aged wood give any instrument visual as well as timbral character—but it no longer looks like some frustrated previous owner believed that scraping the bow frog against the cello’s body was a valid performance technique. Zoran noticed that some of the seams were separating, so he tightened those up while he was at it, and the cello now sounds better than ever.
    Or at least I think it does, judging from playing one C-major scale in first position, which is all I had time to do last night. Zoran had quickly tuned the cello when I arrived to pick it up, but then I had to stash the instrument in the back seat of my car (I’d forgotten to bring the case) and let it rest there while I met some friends for a preprandial drink. Yes, I know it’s unwise for many reasons to leave a cello in a car parked near a bar, but the vehicle was quite visible in the lot next to the Rincon Market, so the cello was in no real danger unless some Sam Hughes aging-yuppie passerby decided just then to launch a life of crime.
    Anyway, after I’d gotten home and cooked and eaten dinner, I picked up the cello and found that Zoran had apparently used some bizarre scordatura tuning on it; the tones coming from the open strings had no relation whatsoever to the standard C, G, D and A. The pegs were apparently a bit loose, and by the time I got everything set aright I had time merely to play a scale to recheck the tuning and take delight in my ability to draw a lovely sound from the instrument—an ability that I cannot, to put it mildly, take for granted. The question remains: Will I get anything decent out of it once I start practicing actual music this afternoon? The hiatus has been so long that I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of what little I’ve learned during the past six months. Initially it was a bit of a relief not to have to carve an hour each day out of my insane November schedule to accommodate practice, but soon I began to miss my cello, and now I know I have some hard work ahead if I’m not going to make a complete fool of myself at my next lesson.